Why Uncertainty is a Good Thing for the Communist Party

It’s understandable why some observers immersed in the drama surrounding China’s leadership handover might worry about the stability of the Chinese Communist Party. But take a step back, and it becomes clear those worries are overblown.

True, Party leader Hu Jintao’s speech yesterday at the opening of the 18th Party Congress highlighted a number of anxieties that officials share about the state of the country and the organization. Corruption got more than its usual dollop of attention, portrayed as a potentially lethal threat, while the depleted state of China’s environment also loomed ominously.

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Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks during the opening session of the 18th Communist Party Congress held at the Great Hall of the People on Nov. 8, 2012.

More than a few observers have seen these trials and tribulations as evidence of tears in the political and social fabric that the Party can ill-afford in the midst of a leadership transition—a transition that many observers believed would be a smooth, institutionalized political handover and think now is in jeopardy.

In fact, there’s ample evidence they’re mistaken.

It’s clear from reading the official media and talking to cadres that Communist Party is searching for ways in which it might rule more efficiently and effectively than it has in the past. Many in the Party are anxious that their abilities to manage their political sphere and the public they supervise. But they’re not rattled. They’re bent on reforming.

To be sure, the reform these cadres want the Party to pursue is not the all-inclusive political restructuring that some people on the outside keep urging Beijing to embrace. Nor are officials about to launch an indiscriminate grab for Western-style democracy. Instead, more than a quiet few in the Party ranks continue to press for better ways of listening and learning, trying to figure out what the masses now want and how to provide it to them. As one authoritative commentary put it on the eve of the Party Congress, “being ‘interactive’ has become an important measure of the ability to govern”.

They know that while the Communist Party currently functions by directives, there are growing sections of society that don’t always take well to uninformed decrees from the top. Many officials—such as political contender Wang Yang — are already well-aware of that fact, and have not been reluctant to talk loudly and often about the need to move towards something more soft and sympathetic than the same old.

Happiness matters, they insist, and finding out what comprises contentment for citizens is far more uplifting for social stability and Party rule than simply shoving people to the ground.

Of course, there are hardliners who think otherwise. But even that sort of dissent within the ranks is good for the new leadership. Such debates don’t undermine the Party; they strengthen it, because new ideas from within the system are being allowed to infiltrate political thinking and be deliberated in the state media with openness and verve.

Likewise, social pressure to offer something more than the tried and now untrue enlarges that discussion, compelling cadres to begin to move from contemplation of political theory to concentrating on the actual concerns of citizens and engaging in real policies.

It’s true that some experiments, like the embrace of greater democracy in the southern village of Wukan, are not working out. Such setbacks will no doubt strengthen those in the Party who continue to think the hardline is the best line. Yet even that pushback against reform is already spurring this next leadership to come up with something better and perhaps even bolder—not the one-off fire-fighting that Wukan wrought, but a more decisive turn at trouble-shooting to preempt public outrage before it ignites.

Moreover, Hu Jintao’s rightful singling out of corruption as a scourge that could “prove fatal to the Party” provides his likely successor Xi Jinping and other members of Beijing’s so called fifth-generation of leaders with the green light to go after those who think that the past should be prologue for the Party. Officials who refuse to recognize that all is not well are likely to be pushed aside.

Today’s Communist Party elite is smart and resilient — far more vibrant and vigilant about the promises and the downsides of reform than its predecessors. Its travails– and the trials still to come —- will be worth watching, not because the Party is reeling, but because it’s already starting to rematerialize as something shrewder.

Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.

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